7.  The applicants Mr Karyagin and Mr Matveyev were born in 1955 and the applicant Mr Korolev was born in 1953. They live in Magnitogorsk, Chelyabinsk region.
8.  On 5 February 1998 the Chelyabinsk Regional Court, composed of presiding judge Ms Ikryannikova and two lay assessors, convicted Mr Korolev, who had occupied the post of the head of the Magnitogorsk police department for the fight against economic crimes, and the applicant Mr Matveyev, who had been his deputy, of several episodes of bribe-taking, abuse of office and unlawful possession of firearms and sentenced them to nine and ten years’ imprisonment respectively. The applicant Mr Karyagin was convicted of aiding and abetting bribe-taking and sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment.
9.  On 19 February 1998 the court sent the judgment to detention facility SIZO 70/2 of Magnitogorsk in which the applicants were detained. Each applicant received a typed copy of the judgment on twenty-seven pages. It had signatures against the words “judge” and “secretary” and the Chelyabinsk Regional Court’s official stamp. The same copy of the judgment was included in the applicants’ personal files at the detention facility.
10.  The applicants appealed against the judgment, denying the offences and claiming that there was no proper evidence of their guilt.
11.  The Regional Court forwarded the case ﬁle, which included a typed copy of the judgment on thirty-one pages, to the Supreme Court for examination.
12.  On 14 October 1998 the Supreme Court examined the case. It held that the finding of the applicants’ guilt had been corroborated by statements of victims and witnesses, expert reports, the applicants’ own statements and other evidence. By a decision of 14 October 1998 the Supreme Court reclassified the applicants’ acts in respect of one of the episodes imputed to them as an attempted crime, reduced the amount of the bribe in respect of another episode imputed to Mr Korolev and Mr Matveyev and upheld their conviction in the remaining part.
13.  In 2000 the applicants learned that there had been two different copies of the judgment. They asked the Regional Court to send them the judgment from the case ﬁle. In October 2000 the Regional Court sent them a copy of the judgment on thirty-one pages. The applicants examined the twenty-seven-page copy and the thirty-one-page copy and identified over 200 differences between them.
14.  The applicants complained to the Presidium of the Supreme Court about the discrepancy, arguing that they had based their points of appeal on the twenty-seven-page copy of the judgment while the appeal court had had before it the thirty-one-page copy of the judgment. They requested the court to exercise its power of supervisory review and quash the judgment. The Supreme Court replied to all three applicants that it saw no reason to reopen the case. Furthermore, in its letters of 31 May 2001, concerning the applications for the cases of Mr Karyagin and Mr Korolev to be reopened, signed by a deputy President of the Supreme Court, Mr Verin, the Supreme Court stated that it had been established as a result of the in-house inquiry carried out at the Chelyabinsk Regional Court that the copy of the judgment on twenty-seven pages had been “falsified”. It had not been endorsed by the judge Ms Ikryannikova. The Supreme Court further stated in one of its above letters that the argument that the trial court had delivered two different judgments in the case, one of which had been sent to the convicts and the other to the appeal instance, “did not comport with the materials of the case”. It stated in the other letter that it could not agree with the submission that the discrepancies between the two copies of the judgment had breached the rights of the defence on appeal.